Why a Video of This Flight Attendant Who Stepped In to Help a Frazzled Mom Is Going Viral

Whether you’re heading off on a family vacation or visiting loved ones, traveling with your children — especially when they’re tiny — can be challenging, to say the least. And of course, traveling as a single parent is a whole different ball game. A mom named Rachel Yuen from Honolulu, Hawaii, knows, and that’s why she was so touched by a random act of kindness she witnessed aboard a Hawaiian Airlines flight, which she recently detailed in a post for Love What Matters.

Yuen shared that she and her husband Jared were catching a flight to LAX on the airline. “As we sat waiting to board the plane, we realized this was our first time being away from our kiddos at the same time,” she noted. “We’ve traveled separately before. But not together and not without the kids.”

The couple began to "comment on all the families traveling. Making jokes how we don’t have a billion bags to carry and how we cannot pre-board...But then we began to notice the mommies who were traveling alone with their babies and we began to plan out how we can offer to help, being we’ve traveled so many times with the kids.”

On the flight, Yuen and her husband noticed a single mom of three who was "doing her best to calm her youngest one down." Yuen observed that her eldest child "couldn’t have been more than 5 years old."

"I watched her turn into an acrobat, trying to soothe her crying toddler, tossing and turning," Yuen shared. "Trying to find a position to make him comfortable. She paced the aisles back and forth and nothing could calm him down. A couple in front of her kept turning around; giving her a stink eye. As if she was purposely trying to inconvenience them. I watched the woman in front turn around and snicker something at her children, and all I could think of was, ‘You wait until this seat belt sign comes off…’ Jared could tell I was getting frustrated. Not at the child screaming. Not even at the mom. But irritated that people could see a mother desperately trying to soothe her child and still lack empathy."

She was about to get out of her seat when she said she noticed a flight attendant walk over to the struggling mom and ask to hold her son. "The mother seemed reluctant, embarrassed and at her wit’s end," Yuen observed. It was then that "the toddler reached out and the flight attendant rocked him...Up and down the aisle until he finally gave in."

She even shot a brief video clip of the moment, which she shared with Love What Matters.

What Yuen watched play out right there on that plane was illustrative of "true Aloha spirit," she said. The Honolulu-based mom lauded Hawaiian Airlines, noting that they “should be proud of the people you hire who go beyond the call of duty and remind the world that kindness isn’t all that uncommon.” She also thanked the flight attendant for her kindness, which "was noticed all around that flight."

What the flight attendant did may have just been a simple gesture, but Yuen saw it as a true gift. She concluded, "You gave a mother a moment to breathe and you have no idea how priceless this was for everyone around to see."

With hope, this sweet moment inspires others to show more compassion and perhaps be more generous and selfless, like this flight attendant, when faced with a similar circumstance.